Robert Saleh attended Dearborn Fordson and Northern Michigan and has coached at MSU and Central.

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Detroit Free Press Sports Writer

They were six of the worst hours of Robert Saleh’s life, but without them he wouldn’t be here today, a week away from coaching in his first Super Bowl as a defensive quality control assistant with the Seattle Seahawks.

Saleh was a 22-year-old credit analyst at Comerica Bank in the fall of 2001, making close to six figures a year and fresh off a playing career at Northern Michigan, when two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in the worst act of terrorism in American history.

Saleh’s brother, David, had just started work at Morgan Stanley and was going through orientation on the 64th floor of the second tower on the morning of Sept. 11.

When the first plane hit, David bolted for the stairs not knowing what happened. He made his way down flight after flight and was on the 20th floor 17 minutes later when the second plane struck Tower No. 2.

With no way to reach his brother, Saleh and his family were in a state of panic, hoping and praying but fearing the worst until a phone call came around 3 p.m. that changed his life. David was alive, thankfully, and Saleh began to take stock of his own future.

“We all thought he was dead,” Saleh told the Free Press last week. “We didn’t hear from him from 9 till I think it was 3 in the afternoon. So I’m just sitting there waiting for my brother to call thinking, ‘God, he didn’t live his life and he didn’t get to do anything he wanted to do.’

“And he thankfully finally called, but that still hung on me. I was 22, I wasn’t doing what I want to do. I knew I wanted to coach football, I always did, but money was crap for a beginner coach. All that weight just kept getting heavier and heavier and heavier, and I literally, it was February of the following year, I broke down.”

The day after Super Bowl XXXVI, when the Patriots beat the Rams on a last-second field goal, Saleh showed up at his office, stared at the pile of papers on his desk and began sobbing uncontrollably.

He told his boss a made-up story about a friend dying in a car accident, left for the day and went to see his brother and his old football coach at Dearborn Fordson, Jeff Stergalas, about changing professions.

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Stergalas put Saleh in touch with another former player of his, Mike Vollmar, then the director of football operations at Michigan State, and a few months later Saleh was enrolled in grad school at MSU and making $5 an hour as a student assistant for the football team.

“Mike looked me in the eye, he looked at my resume and he said, ‘Listen, just looking at you, you’re an idiot. You don’t want to get into coaching. It’s not what you think it is. It doesn’t pay, it’s hard, it’s cut-throat, people are just ruthless,’ ” Saleh recalled. “And I really didn’t care. I knew it’d be a tough road. I wasn’t aspiring to make millions of dollars, I was aspiring to just enjoy life.”

Saleh worked Michigan State’s football camps that summer, and when Ben McAdoo, the new offensive coordinator of the New York Giants, left shortly before the 2002 season for a full-time job coaching the offensive line and tight ends at Fairfield University, he was promoted to graduate assistant.

Saleh spent two years at Michigan State, another at Central Michigan and was a few months into another GA job at Georgia when he sat down to an all-you-can-eat buffet at Golden Corral and got a phone call from his former colleague at CMU, Tony Oden, telling him about an internship with the Houston Texans.

Three days before camp started, Saleh packed up his truck and made the 13-hour drive from Athens, Ga., to Houston, where he spent the next six seasons as an intern, defensive assistant and, finally, assistant linebackers coach.

He was one of the few to survive the Texans’ 2-14 season in 2005, mostly because his internship ran through February, and he spent three years working under defensive coordinator Richard Smith, now the linebackers coach of the Denver Broncos and Seattle’s opponent next Sunday in Super Bowl XLVIII.

Smith actually helped Saleh get his job with the Seahawks three years ago when much of the Texans’ defensive staff was fired following the 2010 season, and the two exchanged good-luck text messages as first-time Super Bowl participants last week.

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Saleh, who helps coach the Seahawks linebackers, script practice and prepare film for the league’s best defense, said he never could have imagined coaching in the Super Bowl when he left the banking business 12 years ago.

“If someone would have said that, I would have thought you were lying to me,” Saleh said. “I would have thought you were blowing smoke up my butt or something, but I wouldn’t have believed it, especially if you would have came at me a year later after I experienced my first year at Michigan State and I realized how cut-throat and how hard it was going to be. All these little bumps in the road I’ve had have been unbelievable learning experiences and it’s led to this moment. And I’m trying to cherish every last bit of it.”

To that end, Saleh stuck a small video camera in his coat pocket for the NFC championship game last week. When the Seahawks beat the 49ers, he raced from the pressbox to the locker room, grabbed his camera and went out on the field to shoot his own footage of the celebration.

Next Sunday, when the Seahawks arrive at MetLife Stadium, Saleh will have his camera with him again, ready to capture another scene in what’s been a dream ride.